April L. Ford is an American-Québécoise writer and teacher.
Carousel, her debut novel, was the 2020 International Book Awards winner for LGBTQ Fiction, and her short story collection, The Poor Children, won the 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award Program for Fiction. april is also the author of three chapbooks: Big Small Mountain Town (Cactus Press), People Are Metaphors and Goodbyes (Cactus Press), and Death Is a Side-Effect (Frog Hollow Press).
Her short story “Project Fumarase” received a 2016 Pushcart Prize and was anthologized alongside work by authors Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Hicok, and Ann Beattie. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in journals across North America and Europe, including Grain, The Lascaux Review, and SAND.
April has been a writer-in-residence at Ucross Foundation and a Robert Johnson Fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. she’s currently developing a novel set in the fictional Appalachian town of Enormity (as seen in her chapbook big Small mountain town), where tragedy and absurdity share the same barstool.
For more than 10 years, April taught creative writing at the State University of New York. During that time, she also served as Managing Editor of Digital Americana Magazine and Associate Publisher for a literary trade imprint in Atlanta, Georgia. today she teaches high school students with autism in Québec’s francophone public education system.
Animal welfare, food security, and literary access are a few of April’s non-negotiables. She volunteers with a community lunch program, facilitates poetry workshops for youth living in residential care, and shares her home with three rescue cats.
April L. Ford – author, etc. 